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Wasted Data

As we consume, we leave stuff behind. We leave behind waste and garbage and refuse. And increasingly, we leave behind mountains of data. That’s true online, as presumably everybody knows, but also in the physical world: Kroger knows which coupons to print out for me when I check out with my Kroger shopping card, because in addition to saving me a few pennies, the card helps the chain keep precise track of my shopping history at its stores.

These are straightforward, almost inescapable, facts of 21st-century consumer life, but they got Indhira Rojas thinking. As a graduate student in the design program of California College of the Arts, Rojas wrote her thesis on the role of design in creating a “zero-waste culture.” This led her to imagine a hypothetical service she has named IndexR, which would mine those retail data mountains and shovel our shopping information back to us in ways that help us become better consumers. There are a lot of reasons that IndexR will probably never exist — but there are even better reasons to consider why something like it should.

The research that led Rojas to her IndexR concept was grounded in concerns about recycling efficiencies. Even living in San Francisco, widely seen as having one of the most sophisticated infrastructures for efficient and eco-conscious waste disposal, she was troubled by a disconnect between that system and those who used it, including herself. Specifically: we all produce lots of refuse, but how often are we uncertain about what can, or should, be recycled? By extension, how much of a handle do we have on our own consumption patterns and their consequences? Statistics show that, as of 2008, the typical person discards 4.5 pounds of stuff per day, 1.5 pounds of which are recycled, but what does that really mean?

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So she began tracking her own consumption-and-waste behavior, compiling detailed information about what she bought and about what she did with the disposable remnants. She then tracked others in her community, amassing information about the buying and discarding habits of seven households, even accompanying these individuals as they shopped in the supermarket. Among other things, she noticed a variety of errors in sorting waste, and plenty of confusion about how to get rid of, say, light bulbs or batteries. “Consumers are left with debris,” Rojas says, “and they don’t always know what to do with it.” Most companies have little to do with the afterlife of the stuff they produce; waste systems, designed for convenience, on some level leave consumers disengaged, “as if you throw something out and it just disappears,” she says.

What Rojas envisioned with IndexR is, in essence, a system that would address disposal uncertainty and inefficiency by engaging all parties. Crucially, her notion does not turn on the sort of obsessive self-tracking she did in her research. A solution “has to be a 50-50 kind of thing,” she says; too much responsibility has already been offloaded onto consumers, who have less information than the producers they buy from. This is what led her to the idea of using the data collecting that is already happening and building on it.

Start with the ubiquitous bar code. It’s already the medium not just for price and information about the thing you’re buying, but also for tracking the fact that you bought it. So suppose that upon checkout at Kroger (or wherever), a shopper received not just a paper receipt but a digital record tailored to the individual. Ideally all your shopping data would flow into one spot, accessible from your computer or mobile device. This could reveal perhaps surprising patterns (drinking more soda than you would have guessed?). But apart from guiding your future consumption, it would also provide information about whether what you’ve already bought can be recycled, and how. If a package needed to be broken into parts, for example, you’d have that information; if unused contents can be composted, you’d get those details too.

Since giving a presentation about IndexR at a San Francisco meeting that was recorded and posted online, Rojas has heard from a few parties who have expressed interest in the idea. But she concedes that the challenges of making it work are enormous. Costs aside, the businesses that collect information about the way we shop do so in order to figure out the best way to sell us more, not to answer our recycling uncertainties or create efficiency in the waste stream. That’s why data-crunching and communication innovations have tended to be more along the lines of apps that let you add stuff to your shopping list, or that scrape your social-media information to recommend new products and services. There is no obvious motivation for retailers to share the information they have compiled.

But that’s a little strange: why shouldn’t you have access to the traces of your own behavior that you leave behind and that others collect? Maybe more than anything else, this is the notion that Rojas wants the IndexR concept to advance. “It’s more of a cultural shift,” she says. “It’s about creating a culture where we own this data. This data is ours.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 5, 2010, on Page MM20 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Wasted Data. Today's Paper|Subscribe